God, the Lapidarist
If there is an afterlife, I wish for it to be a curation of noumena.
We always imagine paradise as white. I’m no different. God—that omnipresence—contracts Himself from the gentle shimmering in every point of space into a human form. The white of heaven looks cooler, almost bluish, now.
He hands me a small stone. Though it appears ordinary at first, it reveals a holographic depth when held, yet it retains its weight.
In heaven, there’s no distinction between imagining, remembering, and perceiving: if you imagine paradise as a white museum of things-in-themselves, so it will be.
As I look upon the stone, I wordlessly understand the history of it. Its beginnings as magma. How it chipped off from a mountain, the footprints of every chameleon that ever stepped on it. How it returned to dust after dissolving in a stream.
As I set down the stone, God gestures to another display case. He shows me a memory from my life: my father yelling at me when I was three. I have no conscious recall of the moment, only its deep echo, but now I see every facet of it, like a lapidarist examining a finished diamond. I now see the shape of my father’s pain, the way inherited codes tighten his throat, the particular fear that made his voice rise.
In that revealed instant I understood something about mercy: if God is perfectly forgiving, it is because He is perfectly understanding.